A memo from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley says the Justice Department and the office of former special counsel Jack Smith obtained spreadsheets with information on at least 639,000 Republican voters, supporters and campaign donors during the Arctic Frost investigation. Grassley’s update was reported by Fox News Digital on October 14, 2026.
Arctic Frost began in 2022 under the Biden Justice Department to investigate efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Smith led the special counsel investigation. Grassley has been conducting oversight of the inquiry and releasing information from whistleblowers; Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee the previous month, according to the source report.
Grassley’s memo says the spreadsheets included more than 148,000 entries identified as donors. The senator characterized most of those contributions as small-dollar donations. The information described in the memo included names, dates of birth, home addresses, email addresses, employment and occupation details, and whether an individual was registered as a Republican. It also listed credit card information, donation amounts and donor-analysis data, the memo said.
The report cited examples of occupations appearing in the data, including retirees, pool technicians, drivers and loggers. It did not provide details about how many people’s credit card information was included or whether any of the information was used beyond the investigation.
Grassley argued that the scope of the material went beyond what the special counsel’s work required. He said the update showed that Smith’s team and the Justice Department collected voter and donor information that was, in his view, highly intrusive. Grassley also said the material supported his concern that the investigation sought to map the Republican Party’s broader network. Those are the chairman’s assessments of the records, rather than findings independently established in the source material.
The memo follows an earlier disclosure by Grassley that Smith’s team collected checks from nearly 5,000 people nationwide who had donated to Donald Trump or Republican organizations aligned with him. The source report does not provide the underlying documents or explain how the earlier checks relate to the spreadsheets described in the latest memo.
At Smith’s Senate hearing the previous month, Grassley asked whether the investigation had gathered donor data. Smith answered yes, acknowledging that his team acquired financial information. He said he could not recall every subpoena while testifying, but stated that subpoenas were issued to gather facts for a criminal investigation into what he called one of the most serious crimes in the nation’s history.
Fox News Digital said it sought comment from Smith’s newly established law firm. The supplied report did not include a response from Smith or his firm. It also did not include a response from the Justice Department or Democratic members of the committee, leaving those perspectives absent from the account.
